Rust assigns players a skin color on character creation, then ties it to their Steam account so they can never change it. This game design decision creates diversity in the player base and has forced many players to play as characters of an ethnicity different from their own. Since the game does not censor players' language, many of these players are hearing themselves called racial insults for the first time. While uncomfortable, this experience also pushes players who might normally be oblivious to those issues (or even participate in them) to consider things from a different perspective.
I find this super interesting. I don't know if I am actually interested in the... Read AllRust assigns players a skin color on character creation, then ties it to their Steam account so they can never change it. This game design decision creates diversity in the player base and has forced many players to play as characters of an ethnicity different from their own. Since the game does not censor players' language, many of these players are hearing themselves called racial insults for the first time. While uncomfortable, this experience also pushes players who might normally be oblivious to those issues (or even participate in them) to consider things from a different perspective.
I find this super interesting. I don't know if I am actually interested in the game itself, but I really like this design choice.
Azurephile Super Member
wrote on 05/29/2015 at 03:04am
That is really cool!
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Path of Exile has been around for quite awhile. If you were in the closed beta it has been around now since 2012. If there is one thing that has always held players back from enjoying this game as a hardcore ARPG experience. It is that of desync.
Desync is when the information you send to the server is not the same as the information your client is reading. So you may walk around a rock to the left on your screen. The server says you walked around it to the right. Now you teleport back to before the rock so that the server can re-sync you to the information the server had on your last known location.
Well I recently received a beta key to their newest and biggest... Read All
Path of Exile has been around for quite awhile. If you were in the closed beta it has been around now since 2012. If there is one thing that has always held players back from enjoying this game as a hardcore ARPG experience. It is that of desync.
Desync is when the information you send to the server is not the same as the information your client is reading. So you may walk around a rock to the left on your screen. The server says you walked around it to the right. Now you teleport back to before the rock so that the server can re-sync you to the information the server had on your last known location.
Well I recently received a beta key to their newest and biggest expansion ever done. I can finally say with certainty that desync has been fixed. The game feels really smooth. The expansion will come out of a closed beta late June or early July. Hope any of you that are ARPG lovers finally find something you enjoy playing.
Overwatch is a upcoming game by Blizzard that is a FPS first for the studio. With each new gameplay footage drop the game looks like a really fun entry into the team shooter space. Taking nods from Team Fortress and Unreal Tournament, Overwatch is a game in a dystopian far future that doesn't bring the gritty dark tone with it. It's also an entirely new set of IP so nothing from the Diablo, Warcraft or Starcraft universes here.
The character shown in this gameplay reveal is Hanzo a parkour assassin that can climb walls and pick off other heroes with his bow. Whereas I don't typically enjoy playing heroes like Hanzo, the overall game mechanics seem interesting to try... Read All
Overwatch is a upcoming game by Blizzard that is a FPS first for the studio. With each new gameplay footage drop the game looks like a really fun entry into the team shooter space. Taking nods from Team Fortress and Unreal Tournament, Overwatch is a game in a dystopian far future that doesn't bring the gritty dark tone with it. It's also an entirely new set of IP so nothing from the Diablo, Warcraft or Starcraft universes here.
The character shown in this gameplay reveal is Hanzo a parkour assassin that can climb walls and pick off other heroes with his bow. Whereas I don't typically enjoy playing heroes like Hanzo, the overall game mechanics seem interesting to try and I can't wait to try the game out.
Blizzard is still unsure if Overwatch will be a free to play game or have some sort of up-front cost but if the success of Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm is an indicator, we might be able to play this one for free too.
I do wonder how long after Overwatch releases the characters will show up in Heroes of the Storm. Maybe a preorder bonus! Buy overwatch and get the characters for free in Heroes.
More importantly, though, this game looks tons of fun! I can't wait to get my hands on it.
jdodson Admin Post Author
wrote on 05/27/2015 at 04:29pm
"I do wonder how long after Overwatch releases the characters will show up in Heroes of the Storm. Maybe a preorder bonus! Buy overwatch and get the characters for free in Heroes."
My guess is for the games that you can actually buy from Blizzard, there will be more digital incentives like Hearthstone packs, Heroes skins, special unlockables and the like. Since I have bought all the physical collectors editions since WC3 I like the idea of getting a bit more for it.
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In it's first ever console debut, The Humble Bundle folks are at it with the Humble Nindie Bundle. Partnering with Nintendo eShop all the games in this bundle are redeemable on the Wii U or 3DS. The titles available on the Wii U are Guacamelee, Stealth Inc 2 & The Fall. The games available on 3DS are Woah Dave!, Mighty Switch Force! & Moon Chronicles. Two games are available for the Wii U & 3DS such as SteamWorld Dig and OlliOlli.
If someone has a Wii U i'd love to hear about how seamless the games are to redeem and how they play.
In it's first ever console debut, The Humble Bundle folks are at it with the Humble Nindie Bundle. Partnering with Nintendo eShop all the games in this bundle are redeemable on the Wii U or 3DS. The titles available on the Wii U are Guacamelee, Stealth Inc 2 & The Fall. The games available on 3DS are Woah Dave!, Mighty Switch Force! & Moon Chronicles. Two games are available for the Wii U & 3DS such as SteamWorld Dig and OlliOlli.
If someone has a Wii U i'd love to hear about how seamless the games are to redeem and how they play.
The latest Mad Max Fury Road is racing to box office gold and on it's way has received a few parody trailers. Would a post apocalyptic Mario Kart game be fun? Not sure, but this trailer is.
The latest Mad Max Fury Road is racing to box office gold and on it's way has received a few parody trailers. Would a post apocalyptic Mario Kart game be fun? Not sure, but this trailer is.
Wick: I think our traffic graph (at the top of the post) speaks for itself. We had a huge initial surge (I assume from being on the front page of Greenlight for being ârecently submittedâ) which QUICKLY dropped off over the week as we moved further and further away from the front page. The later minor spikes came from exposure through Letâs Players and Twitch streamers.*
Then came what is only known as the Dark Times, where we werenât actively promoting it and were more-or-less sitting... Read All
So! Starship Rubicon just got Greenlit. A couple people asked for a postmortem. WELL I WAS GOING TO DO ONE ANYWAY AND HERE IT IS.
Wick: I think our traffic graph (at the top of the post) speaks for itself. We had a huge initial surge (I assume from being on the front page of Greenlight for being ârecently submittedâ) which QUICKLY dropped off over the week as we moved further and further away from the front page. The later minor spikes came from exposure through Letâs Players and Twitch streamers.*
Then came what is only known as the Dark Times, where we werenât actively promoting it and were more-or-less sitting pretty at a steady ~40% of the way to the top 100. We were banking on getting more bumps down the line from doing some conventions and maybe a bundle. Then BAM! Out of the blue, Greenlit! So what on Earth happened??? Why did we get Greenlit when we did? Read on for my best guess:
* (huge shout out to Stream Friends, Maris from GamerQuest, and many others)
jdodson:
If you notice one thing in our post mortem it should be that I am mostly going to agree with Wick on just about everything. He is not only smarter than I am but he also is really good at spinning fire so itâs best to avoid major disagreements.
Like Wick said, the first large traffic spike is pretty apparent. Front page Greenlight means votes. Some people have said having an animated GIF means more people will check you out, unsure if itâs true but I found other Greenlight games animated GIFâs distracting.
The other upticks in traffic was from our December 12th 2014 launch. As you can see the numbers start to head upward as the game generated more buzz. We launched a PR campaign on Cheerful Ghost, social sites as well sending out the usual press kits and review keys to game sites and the Letâs Play community. All press coverage we received, which wasnât much, was all very positive. That said, the majority of our buzz was from from the Letâs Play community. As much as I think I can craft a good press kit nothing beats seeing someone play the game and have fun with it. The night Wick and watched Stream Friends play the game on Twitch was magical.
Wick: Here you can see how our project was faring against the average top 50 Greenlight projects. The most obvious discrepancy is the traffic volume: about 3,000 visitors for us versus 20,000 for them (i.e. we had 14.4% the traffic they did) - an entire order of magnitude difference! D:
It gets a lot more encouraging once you start looking at the actual response we were getting, though: with only 14% of the traffic that they did, we had 34% of their favorites, 40% of their followers and 21% of their âyesâ votes! That is, even though we had much less traffic, each visitor to Starship Rubicon was around twice as likely to respond positively than a visitor to a top 50 project.
Interestingly, we still had 13% of the ânoâ votes that they did -- basically no per-visitor difference. I guess that thereâs just a standard âI donât care about this gameâ level that is applied to all projects.
(per-visitor) rubicon avg top 50 any vote: 75% 70% yes votes: 30% 20% no votes: 45% 49% favorites: 3% 1% (followers is basically the same)
jdodson: Itâs nice to see that Rubicon did better than the top 50 when our numbers are averaged out. I have some guesses as to why we were able to do this but none of them may actually be accurate.
Our Greenlight was basically a Kickstarter pitch. From the start of working with Wick I knew I wanted to focus on him and his story and talk about the game secondly. When you hit the Greenlight page the video automatically plays and you get a few seconds of gameplay and itâs Wick talking about the game. My only regret is the âbouncing on the moon camera workâ which is totally my fault. I was trying to keep the camera moving to give his talk some momentum but I went a bit off the rails. After looking at a ton of Greenlight pages and really enjoying some recent video game documentaries I asked Wick if we could focus on his story as the first push for marketing the game. I think this personal touch at first contact with the game helped soften the audience up to click yes. One thing I told Wick early on is people might not give a shit about the game but people are generally interested in hearing someone's story.
People that came to our Greenlight page were mostly from Indie / Greenlight friendly sources. We received no coverage on Kotaku, IGN, Eurogamer, Gamespot or PCGamer. Our initial spike was from the Greenlight front page, social sharing & Cheerful Ghost. Our later bump was from the games launch, Letâs Plays and Twitch streaming. I postulate these sources are more friendly than larger sites. âIndie sourcesâ have readership that might not always look for the next shooter or sport title. As such Rubicon is something they may enjoy whereas a more mainstream audience would never consider due to its retro charm.
Wick: Eh, I didnât find this graph very useful. It doesnât say anything new (besides it looks like top other items all get giant spikes rather than gradual climbs, probably from specific exposure sources).
Why is there an âask again laterâ option? Literally nobody I can see uses it.
Wick: Now for the Analytics data! ... Huh. Make sure you have screenshots and a video that gets to the point, I guess. I wasnât expecting the peak to be so drastic. The dwarf peak at 61-180 seconds are the people who actually watched the trailer, is my guess (itâs also pretty close to the # of people who came here through facebookâŚ)
Wick: Seeing that our traffic was dominated by Steam Greenlight campers, Iâm guessing that this is just the readout of that population.
...what strikes me as more interesting is how on earth Google knows this! Apparently they just use cookies to track what sites you visit and then stereotype correlate that to known datasets. Or they just ask Facebook.
Iâm not showing the map for spaceâs sake, but I was surprised that only 44% of our traffic was from the US! Next was Russia at 8%, followed by Germany/UK/Canada/France/Austrailia, but itâs a long tail. Apparently Steam is frigginâ global.
Two more minor notes: -- Social (fb / reddit) traffic was only 8%. I wish I could compare their responses versus people who found it through Steam. My moneyâs on them being waay more likely to give it a thumbs-up, but it would be nice to be able to see how large an effect it had. Is our better-than-average positive response due to a small population of supporters? -- Analytics saw a coupla significant spikes in visitors in the week or so before it was Greenlit that donât show up at all on the Steam graph. Bots that got filtered out? Valve internal traffic that somehow doesnât count? Who knows.
...............................................
Whew. Still with me? My takeaways from the whole thing:
Steam is massive.
Your pitiful-but-valient efforts at promotion for months will be completely dwarfed in volume by the sliver of people who happen stumble onto you through Steam in a single day (see point 1.)
You should still be upbeat and talk genuinely and politely to everyone who will listen anyway. Again, I canât back this up with numbers since Steam doesnât show detailed traffic data. BUT! The couple hundred (i.e. dozen) supporters who enthusiastically follow and support you are way more valuable in the long run than two thousand people just passing through.
The selection process is opaque and sorta hit-and-run.
I wanted to wrap this into another post about the process of technically integrating into Steam, but people were asking about the process and it had already gotten sort of long, so expect another postmortem sometime down the road!
Thank you for sharing! I guess I am one of those people on the outside that is really interested in steam integration. Either here or in person I hope to hear that story someday too! This is very interesting to too!
Bethesda let loose 3 seconds of new footage teasing an upcoming event where we will all learn more about "new Doom." From the horses mouth to you:
"Get the first in-game footage from DOOM . See the game unveiled at Bethesda's E3 Showcase - Sunday, June 14th at 7 pm PT."
The game looks great and I can't wait to learn more. Plus, didn't we all sign up to get the Doom beta when we pre-ordered the new Wolfenstein game?
Bethesda let loose 3 seconds of new footage teasing an upcoming event where we will all learn more about "new Doom." From the horses mouth to you:
"Get the first in-game footage from DOOM . See the game unveiled at Bethesda's E3 Showcase - Sunday, June 14th at 7 pm PT."
The game looks great and I can't wait to learn more. Plus, didn't we all sign up to get the Doom beta when we pre-ordered the new Wolfenstein game?
To celebrate the third anniversary of Diablo III, an in-game event is going on now until the 21st! Cows can be found throughout Sanctuary. Upon their death, they will open a portal to a secret realm filled with cows, dead farmers, and plenty of treasure! Farmer corpses give lots of gold when activated.
Check out the news link below: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/19083832?utm_content=external-sso&utm_medium=other&utm_source=App
To celebrate the third anniversary of Diablo III, an in-game event is going on now until the 21st! Cows can be found throughout Sanctuary. Upon their death, they will open a portal to a secret realm filled with cows, dead farmers, and plenty of treasure! Farmer corpses give lots of gold when activated.
In a recent interview with PCGamer, Blizzard talked about a bunch of game related bits and one that stood out to me is that Hearthstone has amassed 30 million players. They mention this is due to launch on mobile. I dived back in after the phone launch and it seems I wasn't alone.
During the interview a question was also asked in how Blizzard gauges the effectiveness of new cards.
"For me, my main goal is not actually to get cards into decks permanently, but to have people experiment with new ideas a lot, which is slightly different. So, for example, Flamewaker caused people to try out decks with tons of spells in them. And some people had some success with that, but... Read All
In a recent interview with PCGamer, Blizzard talked about a bunch of game related bits and one that stood out to me is that Hearthstone has amassed 30 million players. They mention this is due to launch on mobile. I dived back in after the phone launch and it seems I wasn't alone.
During the interview a question was also asked in how Blizzard gauges the effectiveness of new cards.
"For me, my main goal is not actually to get cards into decks permanently, but to have people experiment with new ideas a lot, which is slightly different. So, for example, Flamewaker caused people to try out decks with tons of spells in them. And some people had some success with that, but more importantly they experimented with it. So even if the Dragon decks, after a month of experimentation, donât end up being the best decksâas long as people have had a lot of fun trying things out, then we've succeeded in one of our main goals."
They discussed a few new cards but I wanted to highlight one part of the interview about Grim Patron. It was a new card in Blackrock Mountain which is a 3/3 that costs 5 and when it survives damage another one is summoned.
Blizzard said this when they were asked if the card is a problem:
"Weâre always watching the meta game and Reddit and the forums, but it looks totally fine to me right now. Itâs pretty healthy, itâs powerful, itâs a new deck type, itâs fun. One week itâs like âwow, Grim Patron decks are the strongest this weekâ, but the next week itâs like âOh⌠a totally different deck is really strong right now.â So I think thereâs enough variety right now that itâs not actively something weâre thinking about."
It's a great interview and they talk more about Grim Patron, Dr. Boom and more.
One thing I have been focusing on is getting cards by unlocking gold playing daily quests. It's a legit path but it takes time and patience. I found a good strategy for trying to get the most gold you can from daily quests by strategizing when you reroll them. It's a great strategy and was also useful to know that you can reroll your quests at all!
"Reroll all 40 gold quests. Don't finish 40 gold quests. Finish 60/100 gold quests as soon as possible, unless they require finishing a 40 gold quest. Finish a quest if you can't reroll and you have 3 quests."
I would not assume that clicking the red x would reroll my quest.... I would think it just declines that quest and you lose it, so I just complete them all. This is a nice find!
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In a recent email from Nintendo they dropped some news that they are bringing back the Nintendo Wold Championships. The Nintendo World Championships was a competition in the 90's that kids took part in so the best Nintendo gamer in the world could be crowned. If this all sounds familiar it is because this was the basic plot for the 90's classic film "The Wizard." Nintendo is bringing back the World Championships at this years E3 and I am happy they are making a live stream available to watch.
"For the first time in 25 years, some of Nintendo's biggest fans will get to go head-to-head in a gaming showdown for the ages. Join a worldwide audience by watching the live... Read All
In a recent email from Nintendo they dropped some news that they are bringing back the Nintendo Wold Championships. The Nintendo World Championships was a competition in the 90's that kids took part in so the best Nintendo gamer in the world could be crowned. If this all sounds familiar it is because this was the basic plot for the 90's classic film "The Wizard." Nintendo is bringing back the World Championships at this years E3 and I am happy they are making a live stream available to watch.
"For the first time in 25 years, some of Nintendo's biggest fans will get to go head-to-head in a gaming showdown for the ages. Join a worldwide audience by watching the live stream on Sunday, June 14.
Want to compete? Get ready for qualifying competitions coming May 30."
So far those are the only details about the competition but if you are ready to go head to head with other Nintendo gamers I encourage you to break out your NES gamepads and start practicing!
That is really cool!